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An anonymous reader writes "Cosmos Magazine reports on a design for a lunar habitat that is 90 to 95 percent self-sufficient. The proposed habitat uses a closed-loop life support system that recycles and regenerates air, water, and food, reducing the need for costly supply trips. The north pole of the moon is chosen as a location because of its access to sunlight and useful resources. About 11 astronauts could live and work in the habitat for 2 to 3 years. The project would also help the environment on Earth with recycling and other sustainable practices." The designers say it could be 20 to 30 years before such a habitat could be up and running on the moon.

An interesting proposal is to use sulfur lamps, which provide the needed frequencies for plants and are even more efficient than fluorescents. The 2 week lunar night can be bridged by many plants by lowering the temperature and providing a low level of artificial light for 16 hours in 24. (At about the level of an overcast day on Earth.)

Also, algae can be gown in the 2 week period when light is available, then used to feed animals (esp. fish).

That, once 1 year on the moon, the human body would have become incapable of sustaining itself on earth ? Or has this little tidbit been conveniently ignored. We could send people there for long times, we are not capable of getting them back.

Yeah, all those astronauts who stayed on the moon for a year or more, where are they now? Dead, I tell you!

Muscle and bones can be trained much more easily than on ISS for example, since there is some gravity. Good old weight lifting and running (possibly with weights) will be possible on the moon. Walking and such might need retraining since astronauts might get used to skipping and jumping or whatever, but that's no big deal. So what is it that you think will happen?

We know that coming down to Earth after a year in freefall sucks a big one. But we know nothing about how coming back from the Moon after more than a few days will work.

Also, having a reasonable sized colony of a few hundred that doesn't need too much more care other than being swapped out every few months so that nobody wastes away too much but doesn't require too much other logistical support is a useful thing.

Exercise does not prevent the human body from destroying it's skeleton. It won't work. Furthermore if they aren't infected with the "new" human diseases like on earth their immune system will be dangerously affected.

And just when did the Russians allegedly experiment with this?
We've seen what happens with microgravity by having people in orbit for long periods of time. To know what happens in 1/6 G, you have to expose somebody to it for an extended period. We can simulate increased gravity with centrifuges, but the only ways we currently know to simulate decreased gravity are to 1) go where it exists or 2) go to a lesser gravity field and use a centrifuge.
Nobody has been exposed to 1/6 G for more than a few days, and until it happens this entire sub-thread is pure conjecture.

Valeri Polyakov [wikipedia.org], launched 8 January 1994 (Soyuz TM-18), stayed at Mir LD-4 for 437.7 days, during which he orbited the earth about 7,075 times and traveled 300,765,000 km, (186,887,000 miles) returned March 22, 1995 (Soyuz TM-20). Apparently he is still alive and kicking and his 1+ year spaceflight was spent in zero gravity.

The longest continuous space trip by a crew (with no gravity... none) was 438 days [hypertextbook.com]... that's just over 1.2 years. Another single Cosmonaut managed one day beyond that.

Sure, the three guys who pulled it off were pretty much stuck in a convalescence home for nearly a year before they could walk again, and had to exercise their asses off every day they were up there, but point is that they did manage.

With 0.16 G , one would think you could stretch that out a bit to at least a year-and-a-half (perhaps more) before it got as bad as it did for the current record holders, no? This isn't even counting medical remedies and techniques that weren't available in earlier long-duration spaceflight tests.

There is a very big difference here: In Biosphere 2, the plan was to not import ANYTHING. In this case, its just a matter of reducing imports. Biosphere would probably have gone much better if they were allowed to import 100 kg every 6 months or something like that. For this reason, it can't fail like Biosphere 2. If they fail to grow enough food or if they need some other product, the only problem is that earth has to pay for more supplies.Besides, building a self sustainable base on the moon IS the test.

It's a cool idea, but I still remember being all excited about Biosphere 2 when I was a kid, and it turned out to be a colossal failure.

Biosphere II wasn't so much of a failure as it was a 'no test'. Despite the gleaming claims they made about being a closed enviroment, only lip service was paid towards it in the actual design and construction. Far more money was spent on hewing to enviromental mantras and meeting the philosophic/aesthetic goals of the project than on even quasi serious engineering. (CIP: The 'lungs' had to be added, at great cost, fairly late in the construction because it didn't occur to any of the enviromental gurus that a closed building of that size would have significant pressure changes as the temperatures changed.)

Like Sydney Opera House, Biosphere II was designed by an artist - and then the design was handed over to engineers to make work. As a result, much time and money was spent ensuring the 'rainforest' had rain, the 'ocean pool' had tides, and that the high humidity levels required inside by enviromentalists didn't corrode the whole structure into junk.

On top of that - they leapt/extrapolated too far from their mockup and existing engineering. (By a couple of orders of magnitude.) Then they leapt right into the full bore lock-in without doing any significant commissioning and baseline testing.

I read somewhere that the Russians did experiments with growing plants with 2 weeks of sunlight followed by 2 weeks of relative darkness at low temperature. (Not lunar nighttime temperature, but above freezing.) It seems that there are plants can acclimatize to such conditions. (In particular, peas.) They remain dormant and are able to survive for the 2 weeks when the temperature is lowered less light is available, then continue growing. Using specially tuned LEDs, we could provide the interim power for the 2 weeks "economically." (Relatively speaking. NASA contractors would probably charge million$!)

Why is it that we had our first flight in 1903, 36 years later we exploded our first atomic bomb, 25 yeras after that we had a man in space, and only 8 years after that we had human beings on the moon. In the last 38 years what have we done? Why couldn't we put a man on the moon 9 months from now if we needed to? 30 YEARS to get this base going? If we started developing technology at the rate we were 100 years ago, we should have home based cold fusion reactors in 30 years! We should have near light-speed travel in 30 years! We should have mastered matter/energy conversion in 30 years!!!

What have we been doing in the last 38 years? Not a whole lot. But we also have this little bit of trouble here: We have limited resources for science (the main being time. Monetary problems can be sorted out easily if we wanted,) and with the lack of any real space threat in the near-future, our scientists have been busy going off and doing research for things other than space exploration. Sure, we got the Hubble up in the sky, along with the International Space Station, but those were basically creat

You limited your scope to manned space exploration/environments for advancement, but used the whole range of past advancements as your example of past progress.

In fact, you are quite mistaken. In the past 30 years, we have not had any major human engineering feats (for example: Shuttles, satellites, ISS, etc.) compared to the previous decades leading up to the lunar landings. Instead, we have integrated technology and scientific advancements into new space age. Products of this are ever present in our eve

yeah, i suppose your right..we've created all sorts of WONDERFUL things like:cable tv!satelite tv!satelite radio!FM stereo RADIO!HDTVs!!!teledildonics!halo3!CELLPHONES!!!!SECOND LIFE!!!!!the spread on the WWW? any slashdot nerd with his/her salt should know that tcp/ip has existed since the 70s. THAT was the revolution and it happened 30 years ago. The fact that you can now use that creation to display all sorts of colorful images on your monitor means NOTHING! And the network has only come because peop

1) NASA "ought" to be researching stuff like this... because they are going to need it in 20 years or so. But projects like this have been getting de-funded to pay for the Orion capsule (which, I might add, is in trouble -- it's too heavy and they are trying to make it lighter by removing redundancy and capabilities instead of trying to do things like remove a crew member or switching the first stage away from a 5-segment SRB)2) This is fairly easy to test on earth. Except for the whole question about how well algae will reproduce in lunar gravity. The ISS was supposed to research these kinds of problems but the module that would have done this research is not going up.3) "90-95%" self-sufficient is probably a pointless task to try and do all at once. It's probably far simpler to just add extra sufficiency over time so that you don't get nasty biosphere-two-ish surprises.

Disclosure: I work at NASA.
To be fair, we areresearching [google.com] self sufficient lunar habitats. I probably see an average of 6 papers a year on the topic at the ICES or COSPAR conferences. The real trick is making a compelling case that regenerative life support saves you ESM (Equivalent System Mass). Everything at NASA is reduced to the mass of the system, and thus how expensive it is to launch. Harry Jones, Alan Drysdale, and other big wig life support analysts aren't convinced complicated regenerative systems, especially crops, will actually make for a cheaper lunar or orbital system. The farther you are away from earth, however, the more sense it makes. One could make the argument that we should test crops on the moon for eventual deployment on Mars, but it would be a very expensive experiment.

Settling in a gravity well is just stupid. I understand the romance of "living on another world", but just the health difficulties are incredibly hard to solve, along with Lunar nights (I know they want the north pole). The practical difficulties are insane. Will plants grow well in 1/6th gravity? Who knows?

If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station. Yes, the engineering is difficult, but nowhere near the problems of building on the moon, and you can build it closer to earth. You get perpetual, consistent sunlight for power, artificial gravity. You can do zero gravity experiments by setting up labs at the hub, which you can't do on the moon. And doing an emergency escape capsule would be way easier than having to launch off the moon.

Why NASA is still talking about going to the moon is beyond me. We should be doing missions to near-earth asteroids to see if the materials would be useful for building large space stations, and experimenting with robotically producing I-Beams.

Settling in a gravity well is just stupid... If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station.

It is not stupid, it is a trade-off. Sure it is a gravity well, but a weak one that is not hard to overcome. That is in exchange for access to raw material for building things. Tunneling into the moon or using the material to build structures is a lot more practical than going to the expense of lifting every bit of material needed out of earth's gravity well. The moon is not a perfect site but it seems like a reasonable baby step to me, before we look at building a space station somewhere useful, like the

That is in exchange for access to raw material for building things. Tunneling into the moon or using the material to build structures is a lot more practical than going to the expense of lifting every bit of material needed out of earth's gravity well.

Whatever advantage there is to the raw material is more than overwhelmed by the practical difficulties of dust and the temperature swings, just for starters. The moon is an incredibly harsh environment -- much harsher than space itself.

Settling in a gravity well is just stupid... If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station.

Actually...

The moon is a really good place to settle. There is a gravity well; but it's such a small one that you get the convenience without the penalty. It's nice having things fall down; it makes all kinds of useful resources --- rock, ice, metal --- easily accessible, and you don't have to worry about stuff drifting off. Not to mention that all the production techniques we know about involve gravity at some point. It's also nice having such a ludicrously small gravity well that you can get into orbit with something the size of an Apollo lander rather than a Saturn V. It's an excellent compromise.

It's also really nice being three days travel away from home. In the event of an emergency, it's entirely feasible to sprint home directly from the lunar surface. You can't do that from an asteroid, where you've travelled for months just to get there.

You're right in that asteroids are excellent places for robotic mining... unfortunately, we don't know how to do that yet. The state of the art just isn't there. Given that we still don't have the technology to travel anywhere in other than a minimum-energy transfer orbit taken months, and that mission planners have to plot crazy momentum-stealing flybys of practically every inner planet in order to minimise delta-V, launching experimental robot refineries from the surface of the Earth just isn't going to happen. Wait another twenty years and build 'em on the Moon instead. You'll have the knowledge, the personnel, the materials, and you won't have to lift them out of Earth's huge gravity well.

Seeing how the project to build a self-sufficient sealed habitat on Earth ran into some unexpected difficulties [wikipedia.org], I'd strongly suggest postponing lunar habitats until one has been run at least a full year on Earth. After all, if there's some nasty surprises waiting, it's better to find them when safety is a few dozen meters, rather than 400 000 kilometers, away.

Agreed. Besides, we could drop a few of these on the very worst places on Earth, and they'd most likely (Well, not in an active volcano, the pressure limitations of the ocean bottom, etc.) be a cake-walk compared to the moon.

... is pretty worthless; in 30 years our tech will have, hopefully, seriously evolved. In 30 years the earths political systems and power balance could be totally different. If you cant do it in ten years change your focus to something else.
I think this is a great idea but giving something this much time is the ultimate form of procrastination. There is *no* reason they cant have this well in the works in a decade. If the money is not there well then put it on the shelve and come up with something people will pay to research.

OK, now the serious part: biosphere 2 probably wouldn't have been the joke that it was on the talk shows if the stated goal of the program was to find out just how sustainable it could be with then state of the art engineering and technology, rather than completely seal it for 2 years and see what happens.

As it turns out, it wasn't 100% sustainable, and they did have to "cheat" which caused endless laughs. Serious science did come out of it, but who remembers any? One thing I remember that was interesting, and in retrospect should have been obvious, was that then ants they brought aboard for typical ant ecological duties _could_not_be_controlled. Duh. Everywhere but where they were supposed to be, getting into everything but what they were supposed to be doing. (When I was in California this summer, I encountered ants small enough to invade (unsealed) jars of peanut butter with the lids screwed down). Another thing was the inefficiency of their oxygen cycle. I think that was the ultimate reason they popped the hatches.

They would have been better off had they sealed up, did a progress report every 1 or two months, and replaced/modified any technology or systems that were not performing as well as planned. And brought the orkin man in.

Even so, I am assuming that these people learned from biosphere 2, and that their 95% sustainability has some basis in fact. But will it be 95% sustainable on the moon? It will be a disaster if you get there, set it up and find out it is only 60% sustainable, and the materials you hoped to mine on the moon are not as easily obtainable as you hoped.

No doubt any such venture should have a lifeboat in orbit and an ascending vehicle.

One thing I remember that was interesting, and in retrospect should have been obvious, was that then ants they brought aboard for typical ant ecological duties _could_not_be_controlled.

Actually, the ants which ultimately took over the biosphere were never supposed to be there in the first place. They had carefully selected a couple of ant species however the species which dominated road in on some plants which were not properly quarantined. The "alien" species quickly dominated and destroyed the other two. I actually visited Biosphere 2 while I was living in Arizona. Those little brown ants were all over the place.

Other good lessons learned:

Concrete releases carbon dioxide. Loads of it. Way more than their small environment could convert back to oxygen.

The glass in the dome absorbed frequencies of light which many plants need for photosynthesis. Plants didn't grow as well as they originally thought.

It really was a remarkable place, even if it was treated as a red-headed step child by the media. The primary lesson is that building a closed, self-sustaining environment is a lot more complicated than anyone thinks. All the more reason we should keep trying and keep learning.

The cynic says it will make for the perfect "Alcatraz". I mean, what a great place to send all the worlds most hardened criminals. Should anyone happen to break free, they still have to manage crossing over 238,000 miles of void to get back to Earth.

Oh, and if something goes wrong and people die; who cares. Just a bunch of murders and rapists that should have died long ago anyways...

You have to learn to walk before you can run. The moon presents a place where we can learn to create a self-sufficient habitat in a real situation. Before we try and establish ourselves on Mars or even interstellar, we need to prove we can live in space by camping in our own backyard, so to speak.

And if we do manage to get He3 fusion as a practical energy source, we can at least mine for that as a resource;-)

So why don't they set this up in the antartic, or death valley? prove that a closed air tight system can be viable and go from there? Biolab? or what ever was too much in a small space, they should try a simplier version of that.

Once it is working good, then go for the moon. by that point you will have found the way to make it small enough to fit on a rocket anyways.

I don't think anyone's suggesting that the moon is the first step. I would expect that the 20-30 years of funding and research would absolutely include proving the concept on Earth first. Still, the moon becomes a logical stepping stone to interplanetary colonization and terraforming.

To sum:1) Small closed habitat on earth2) Test habitat on Moon3) ???4) Profit!

Debatable. Skimming through the hits turned up by a google of "mitosis+microgravity", the experimental results are all over the place, with some of the biggest effects seen in experiments where there was little control against other effects (cosmic rays, high G and vibration effects from launch (sounding rocket experiments), etc. There also seem to be result differences between simple lifeforms (eg yeast), plants, and animals.

If mitosis really screwed up in freefall, astronauts spending more than a couple of months on a space station would start to die horrible deaths due to non-replacement of their blood cells.

It's been done. I just skimmed TFA briefly, but did see an explicit reference to Bios-3, a (Soviet) Russian closed-loop habitat at a research center in Krasnoyarsk (Siberia). Unlike the later Biosphere 2 (the greenhouse-like one in Arizona you're probably thinking of) this was much smaller, indoors (lighting for the plants was artificial -- and the whole thing had an external water cooling system to remove excess heat) and focussed mainly on recycling air and water. They did grow some of their own food (algae and wheat, yum), but also had regular food inputs from outside. Partly this last was due to Russian regulations governing experiments involving humans, by law they were required to be supplied with a regular ration of meat.

Anyway, the experiments were successful within the design parameters. (I had a chance to visit the facility a few months after Krasnoyarsk was opened to westerners, I still have a sample of the wheat grown within it.)

Biosphere 2 was more ambitious, aiming for 100% closed and no artificial lighting for the plants, for a two-year duration. They didn't make it, due to some surprises in the atmospheric chemistry (and things like interaction with the still-setting concrete), and the thing was way more than would be set up on the Moon anytime soon anyway. Bios-3 was much closer to a Lunar habitat prototype, and proved to be workable. (Yes, there'd still be some supply issues -- it will be a long time before anywhere off-Earth is totally self-sufficient, you need huge buffers and/or very good monitoring to make up for random events in the ecosystem. (Being biological, there are always random events.)

Aside from being able to get some raw materials from the surface of the Moon, it's actually more of a pain to put a colony on the Moon than it would be to build a space colony.

Even though its weaker than Earth's, you've still got that damn gravity well to climb down into & out of, you can't even change the "gravity" like you could in a space station, and you have to deal with all that damn dust which mucks up your machinery & gets into your lungs.

We'd learn a LOT more about living in space by building a fairly self-sufficient space colony, and have quite a few more options of where to put the colony & control over the living environment.

I think the point is pretty moot, though - I don't see either public or private sector with the will to expend the resources necessary to get such an ambitious project put together.

Frankly, short of a potential all-life-ending scare like an asteroid or massive plague, the bulk of humanity seems to have lost any motivation to expand out into space, and are more-or-less content to fight each other for resources until there won't be enough resources left to expand out into space on a large scale.

Even though its weaker than Earth's, you've still got that damn gravity well to climb down into & out of, you can't even change the "gravity" like you could in a space station, and you have to deal with all that damn dust which mucks up your machinery & gets into your lungs.

Gravity is actually a err... mixed curse.

I suspect that for processes that don't require microgravity, it's much easier to work on the moon. I agree on the dust, although that's only an issue if you habitually leave your habita

You're an astronaut? And you got lucky enough to be on one of the comparatively few missions with a woman on board? And you SCORED? *high fives!*;)

The objections you mention are actually covered briefly in Peter F. Hamilton's book Pandora's Star - he has his starship crew sleeping in padded 'cages' from which the captain gets a few bruises at one point.

The poster asks why go to the moon, and what does the moon have that we don't have, and space is an answer. If you don't think real estate is valuable, then please tell us you think there is gold or water or whatever you think the moon has, and refrain from cowardly marking posts offtopic.

...when the planet is so overpopulated, that the one and only resource the moon has, space, will actually become valuable enough to justify the expense and trouble of living there.

Space is more abundant on Earth than the resources necessary to sustain life. We need: food, water, energy, and air. None of these things are on the moon. We can set up production facilities for these things, but for all the expense, the oceans would be the first candidate. Since the oceans cover 3/4 of Earth's surface and we haven't even begun to colonize them, there's plenty of area available before the moon becomes economically attractive.

Overpopulation isn't about needing more space to build houses. It's a problem of over-taxing the life-sustaining resources nature provides.

For Science! No, but really. The moon is a great place for a few things - like a telescope. You can make a huge one that is always hidden from earth's interference. Also, if you have a place to stay anyway, long-term low gravity experiments. We know you get screwed up in microgravity, we know you do fine in full gravity. But what about a little gravity? We don't really know.

Also, geology. Study the moon itself. In preparation, perhaps, for later mining.

Set up a WOW realm on the moon. Sure, internet connection with anything on Earth would have latency measured in 10's of seconds...but that's fine for web, IRC, IM, etc (everything but gaming). So the moon would just have its own dedicated realm(s). If they did that I'd go there.

Actually, lag time (round trip, moon and back) would be about 1000 milliseconds or so, give or take - call it 1500ms to give it a comfy total.

Speed of light each way: ~250ms, or ~500ms total there and back (IIRC)
Rough lag from satellite to earth-bound Internet line (including all the A/D conversion crap): 125ms each way, or 250ms total.
Avg. lag from land-line link to typical WOW server: 50-300ms, depending.

It would be about like playing Quake 3 on a 9400-baud modem against a bunch of LPB's.

Yes it is fine.UDP drops packets that are out of sequence, so as long as you keep most of the frames in the right order, your stream will simply be delayed 10 seconds.If you want bi-directional AV that is fine too, you will just have a total lag of 20s between when a question is asked and when the answer starts arriving.-nB

To get away from Earth. Some say humanity, in its current form, is doomed to destroy itself. Being on another astronomical body would afford some protection from that, should we Earth-bound folks finally kick the bucket.

Some folks also crave being on the frontier, where everything is new. It's risky, but our species has made quite a living off of that particular trait.

Uh because you would be in the history books? The first moon colonists is a pretty big deal. Even if it requires a lot of personal sacrifice to live on the incredibly boring moon for an extended period of time, and detrimental to your health as well.

Some people who have been to the moon say that the 1/6th G gravity their is more comfortable than either the Earth's 1 G or the zero G they experienced in free fall.So in short, people might just like the moon.I wouldn't because I could do much except stay indoors under the few meters of rock and rubble used to shield from solar radiation. But if I were the type who liked sitting inside a small room 24x7 with a computer or TV screen then the moon would be the place, It only the price were not a million dol

You don't even need a mile.I've often proposed that you need to send up a couple drills (think mines or Chunnel) and send them to a crater. Drill into the sides of the crater, laying down an epoxy against the walls as you drill.Once primary drilling is done, you can place a pressure door on each tunnel, charge to 10 ATM and release a fine mist of polymer. It will find any cracks and seal them, then when you are operating at 1 ATM the 10X margin you have is adequate. The tunnels can be laid out radially from the crater center and a hub can be located in the middle.

Sure, everything I know about huge scale digging machinery I learned from the History Channel. But even in the modern day, digging things out is a huge task. You don't go very far in a day, your machinery takes impeccable maintenance, the mining is prone to accidents or destroyed machinery, you need tons of spare parts--and that's in mountains that we've been practicing digging for a few thousand years! A fully self-sufficient mining operation on EARTH is enormous fantasy at the moment, because there's j

You missed a whole bunch of details that make the difference between fantasy and something worth pursuing in the near future. Perhaps the most important is that Lunar regolith is hard-packed and difficult to drill into, and also perhaps the most abrasive naturally occurring substance found. It's been pulverized to fine particles by repeated micrometeor strikes, packed firm by shock waves from strikes nearby, and had no erosion to smooth the edges. Oh, it's also statically charged. Have fun maintaining y

The challenge and thrill of developing a brand new human society? Exploring virgin terrain never seen by humans before? Extreme sports - think of climbing moon's mountains. The joy of jumping up and doing multiple somersaults before landing?

I am pretty sure only scientists will be allowed in the first settlement though, unless some crazy multi-billionaire helps to bankroll the project.

hopefully they are getting rid of the mini ocean, the coral reef, and the desert to concentrate on plants that produce O2, and food.

Biosphere to me was a waste of space. they tried to do too much in to little space. If they concetrated on say just the rainforest r just a group of plant bearing trees, they would have been a lot better off.

It was less about surviving out in space than it was a giant global warming experiment.

To be fair, the Biosphere probably would have been a lot more successful if Bud and Doyle hadn't thrown that huge party and totally knocked the ecosystem out of whack. Even then, though, they managed to do a pretty good job of cleaning it up, and everything turned out happily ever after, although the deal with the exploding coconuts did cause a bit of a scare.